I managed to get quite a bit of labbing done this week. The vast majority of it being Volume I RIP, EIGRP, and OSPF labs. I completed Volume III lab 1 over the weekend.

Friday was really busy at work as mother nature was trying to blow away large parts of California. Between rerouting Call Center traffic and shutting down devices, I put in a long day at the office. On Saturday night, I stopped to get gas and forgot which side of my car my gas cap was on. I’ve had this car for seven years and if you had put a gun to my head and asked me which side the gas cap was on I would have had to flip a coin. I only mention this brainfart incident as a harbinger of my Sunday lab session.

On Sunday I spent hours trying to work out why I was having such a problem with handling a relatively simple route redistribution. I had spotted the issue (actually the lab spells it out for you) but was unable to get the routes to appear the way that they were supposed to. I drew diagrams. I removed and added configurations. I still could not get it to work (even after looking at the solution guide). I finally figured it out – I had completely screwed up my route-map(s) due to a basic misunderstanding of how route-maps work (I’ll post an LFU with the details later). I was laid low by a mistake that nobody this far in to studying for the CCIE should have made. Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you. :-(

I completed all of my goals, except for doing the Volume I BGP labs. This week, I’m going to be out of town Thursday through Saturday, so I’ll try to get some more Volume I labs done as well as view some IEATC sessions. I’ll also try to catch up on my Volume II and III lab postings.

area nssa translate type7 suppress-fa- Ethan Banks shares a great scenario concerning what happens when two area 0 ABRs border an NSSA area. Who handles the 7-to-5 LSA translation? If an ABR learns a route as an N1 from an NSSA, and the same route as an E1 from another neighbor – which does it prefer? This is a great scenario to mock up in Dynamips.